


The Things We Left Behind

by TheLionInMyBed



Series: Raised By Wolves [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Elves, Fantasy, Gen, Horror, Imrael has a thirst, Khazri has communication issues, Unresolved Sexual Tension, curiosity has killed way too many cats, someone call the police, spooky things in dark places
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 07:18:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10238837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: The adventuring life is not quite as exciting as Imrael may have lead himself to believe.Unfortunately that's easily mended - a little misplaced curiosity,  some structural instability, and the memory of something that should not have been left behind are all it takes to make his life very exciting indeed.





	

When he put a hand to his forehead, it came away wet. In the darkness he could almost pretend it was sweat or condensation but he’d been a doctor long enough to know the tackiness of blood when he felt it.

Conjuring light was one of the first tricks a wizard learnt, something Imrael had been able to do since he was seven, but to conjure he needed to be calm and focused and for the thoughts not to jumble in his head. Healing concussions was far harder than lighting a room and, even though Imrael was very good at it, nigh impossible to do while suffering from one. He started to laugh at the unfairness of it all but the noise was frightening, too loud in the enclosed space, and he stopped abruptly.

It felt like he’d been sitting there forever, with the darkness pressing up against his eyes, but that was probably just the head injury. It couldn’t have been long, or Khazri would have found him already.

The most sensible thing he could do was to keep still and wait for rescue. Moving would only get him lost - _more_ lost - and end in a fall down another shaft, and a broken leg for his troubles. Ignore the terror rising in his throat, threatening to choke him - _what if the air runs out, what if you suffocate, what if you’re suffocating right now?_ \- and be sensible.

“There’s no reason to panic,” he said aloud.

_What if there’s no way to reach you from the surface? What if he’s given up? What if he never bothered looking for you at all? What if you’re already dead and this is the afterlife of a rather unimaginative god?_

That was just silly.

He let his head loll back against the rock wall. It was cold, and very smooth, and he found himself wishing he knew more about geology. Was it metamorphic or igneous, and what was the difference anyway? If he knew, maybe he could do something clever with fault lines, or erosion to escape. Or at least distract himself more effectively.

Khazri would probably know, and he resolved to ask him if - _when_ \- he found him. A childhood spent underground must have taught him a thing or two about stone. Mind you, a lifetime spent on the surface hadn’t taught Imrael how to tell an oak tree from an elm, so perhaps he shouldn’t make assumptions.

Were these tunnels carved out by some underground stream? The air was damp and cool, with a metallic tang to it, for all that the darkness was as suffocating as a scarf wrapped tight around his face. If the cave - _tunnel?_ \- was caused by a stream, wouldn’t following the course lead him out?

_Or deeper in. Pick a direction, flip a coin, pretend you’re not damned either way._

Air currents existed, he was sure. He sat as still as he could, ignored the throbbing in his temple, the itch on the tip of one ear, the cramp in his legs, and tried to feel a breeze, feel even the smallest, most imperceptible disturbance in the air. He blanked his mind, expanded his senses, focused his entire being into becoming one with the world around him.

He felt absolutely nothing. He scratched his ear.

***

It was all his own fault of course.

In the gentle autumn sunlight, the ruins at the top of the rise looked about as menacing as his grandmother’s cottage. Birds sang in the soft green vines that swathed the walls and what stone was left bare gleamed as though gilded.

“I know you find fun confusing and frightening,” Imrael said. “But just a little of it won’t kill you.”

“Other things can,” Khazri said darkly. He clearly saw some danger in the picturesque rubble that Imrael didn’t, but then Khazri saw assassins in every shadow, fangs hidden behind every smile. He could twist ‘good morning’ into a death threat.

“The wolves don’t like it here,” he added which wasn’t as convincing as he seemed to think. Imrael had noticed that just as Khazri responded to their moods, they reflected his, acting on his anger, his annoyances, and his suspicions. They were afraid now, keeping close to their master, ears laid flat and bellies pressed to the ground, but it proved nothing beyond Khazri not wanting to go.

“Are you scared of a pile of mouldy old stone?” Imrael prodded.

“Concerned. For you. What if we have to fight?”

Imrael wasn’t sure whether to be charmed by the unexpected consideration or peeved over being patronised. He settled on being pedantic. “Fight _what_? Stinging nettles? The inevitable degradations of time?”

“In old places things...things get left behind,” Khazri said at last, unhappily.

Imrael’s ears pricked up. “Things like treasure?”

“No. Well, maybe. But that’s not what I meant. Other things.”

“That’s precisely vague enough to be intriguing.” And Imrael was in desperate need of intrigue.

When Keira Arroway’s father had threatened to disinherit her for chronic irresponsibility and an utter disinterest in the lands she was to inherit, it hadn’t taken much begging or a significant cut of her drinking money to persuade Imrael to go survey them for her. Although he told himself it was an opportunity to put his education to use helping people, he couldn’t deny that he was at least as excited at the chance to venture more than ten miles beyond the limits of the city of his birth.

The wider world, it turned out, contained a good many fields of turnips, a lot of trees and hardly any adventure at all. They’d been a month upon the road and he still thought back fondly to the morning, eight days ago, that they’d seen a field of peas.

Well he was damned if he was going to let Khazri’s paranoia ruin ruins for him. “You can wait here,” he said, and started up the rise.

The ruins didn’t look quite so appealing up close. They jutted up from the top of the hill like broken teeth from a jawbone, grey and crumbling. Still, what remained of the architecture was done in a blocky style he didn’t recognize, and that was far too interesting to pass up.

“What do you think it was?” Khazri asked from just behind him.

Imrael, who had not heard him follow, suppressed the urge to yelp. “A temple, maybe? It’s odd to have one so far from anything else, but I’m not sure what else it could be.”

Khazri tugged vaguely at his hair and stared off into the middle distance. “No,” he said at last. “This doesn’t feel like a holy place.”

Imrael rolled his eyes. “And what does a holy place ‘feel’ like?”

“...I don’t know. Not this.” Even fearful, Khazri was fey and strange in a way that grated against Imrael’s sense of propriety. There were rules to the world, ones Imrael had seen  demonstrated often enough at the university, and he had put aside his people’s superstitions for rationality and the scientific method in favour of them. He liked Khazri, really he did, but that wide-eyed credulousness was exhausting sometimes.

“It could have been a monastery,” he said defiantly.

Khazri said nothing.

The wolves stopped well back from the buildings and would not come closer, not when Khazri called, not when he offered them food, not when he caught one by the scruff and tried to drag it with him.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he told them, but they remained, cowering and whining before the fallen arch that led into the complex. “We won’t be long,” he said finally and, reluctantly, and left them be.

The outer buildings had no roofs, no walls standing higher than Khazri, and did not, Imrael had to admit, hold any great interest. Grass and fallen stone sketched out a plan of what had once been rooms and Imrael walked the perimeters of them, kicking pebbles and poking weeds aside with the toe of his boot. Fragments of mouldy wood and shards of once-bright pottery overturned to send pale grubs and scuttling things lurching for cover from the light, but he found nothing whole. Nothing that would indicate who had built this place or why. “Storerooms, perhaps?”

“My family had a warehouse,” Khazri blurted. He seemed as surprised as Imrael that he had spoken. “It wasn’t ours to start with. But we ended up with it. And there were things there.”

“Things?” Imrael prompted. “Like sacks of flour? Antiques?”

“Just. Things. It was like this,” he said, gesturing helplessly at the ruins all around them.

Sometimes Imrael couldn’t tell when Khazri was being inarticulate and when he was being deliberately obtuse. He assumed the latter and, declining to indulge him further, walked off towards the more intact buildings up ahead. Khazri took the hint and stopped talking, padding silently in his wake.

“It might have been a necropolis?” Imrael suggested not a moment later, his resolution not to engage in unproductive arguments forgotten as swiftly as he’d made it. “That might explain the isolation.”

“Maybe.”

“Local stone,” he said, as though he were not guessing, and picked up what he thought was a piece of flint. Under the pillowy moss, its planes and angles were smooth and hard as though it were fresh-knapped. He set it back atop the ruined wall he’d plucked it from and strolled over to the building at the centre of the complex. This one was still roofed, and there was some decoration about the doorway, scrollwork carved into a lintel of softer stone.

Imrael was only a little taller than average for a man - he _supposed_ that made him tall for an elf - but had to duck beneath it, and his hat brushed the ceiling when he straightened. A small room, windowless but enough light spilt through the doorway that some stringy yellow grass had forced its way up through the cracks between the floor tiles. Across from him, another doorway gaped and, perfectly certain that it would turn out to be a dead end and a waste of time, Imrael started for it anyway.

“Don’t go further,” Khazri said from the threshold, ears flattened against his head like one of his wolves.

“What’s wrong?”

Khazri didn’t answer. His head was tilted back, eyes fixed upon the damp cobwebs that blanketed the ceiling.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of spiders,” Imrael said, “because I won’t believe it of a nice Zalach’anni boy like you. Maybe you could send a prayer your Lady? Ask her to make something interesting ha-”

“ _Stop,_ ” Khazri snarled, actually baring his teeth.

It was disquieting enough that Imrael stepped back a pace, hands raised before him. “Woah, hey, I’m sorry! What did I say?”

As swiftly it had come, the fury - if that was what it had been - was gone and Khazri’s face was blank. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Just- I’ll wait here. Be quick? Please?”

“Aren’t you curious? About anything?”

“I’ve seen enough dead cats. Watch your step,” said Khazri, a ragged silhouette against the light outside. “The floor’s uneven.”

***

A little more than ‘uneven’, it turned out.

He probably owed Khazri an apology for not taking him more seriously. Although if he’d said more about deadfalls and structural instability and less about bad feelings and lost property, Imrael might have taken him more seriously.

Well, if he got Imrael out of here alive, he’d make it up to him however he wanted. Groveling, flowers, the bafflingly specific sex act of his choice.

“Come on Khazri,” he said aloud. “Where are you?”

“Here,” said a voice by his ear. Imrael screamed and flailed in a way that he’d certainly deny later, completely failing to connect with the thing, the _person_ , by his ear.

“You took your time,” he managed.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Khazri said, which was absolutely a lie but one Imrael wasn’t about to call him out on.

“Thank you,” he said. Imrael tried to cultivate an aura of wry sardonicism but that came out embarrassingly sincere. He couldn’t find it in himself to care. “I knew you’d find me.”

There was no reply but Imrael hadn’t really expected one. “I suppose this is nothing to you,” he said, scrambling to his feet. A hand up would have been appreciated but Khazri always did shy away from touch and Imrael supposed he should be glad he’d come at all.  

“Nothing?” Khazri ‘s voice was almost inflectionless, and Imrael had to mentally insert the question mark.

“Zalach’ann? It’s subterranean, yes? You must have spent a lot of time underground as a boy?”

“Maybe. Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Well. Glad to hear it. You’ll have us out in no time at all then.” He reached out in the vague direction of Khazri’s voice but his hand caught only air and then, when he reached further, the rock wall on the opposite side of the cave.

“Here,” said Khazri again, a few meters further on and, cleaving tightly to the wall, Imrael crept after him.

***

They walked forever.

It couldn’t have been long at all but in the dark there was no way of telling time. Imrael counted breaths, counted footsteps and counted the number of times he’d asked Khazi how far and been told ‘further.’ He’d have counted Khazri’s footsteps too but he, as ever, made no sound.

“I don’t suppose you thought to bring a torch?” he asked after stubbing his toes for the fifth time. More important than _that_ annoyance, the stone walls of the tunnel were cold and damp beneath his hands, slimy with some kind of mould. If there had been carvings in the buildings above, time and weather had wiped them clean but here, beneath the muck he could feel the sharp-cut edges of some kind of rune and wanted to see them. “I could maybe conjure a light now,” he said carefully. His head didn’t ache so badly as it had and he stretched out one hand before him, gathering his focus-

“ _Stop_.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t. Please?”

“Would it hurt your eyes?” Imrael guessed. He never had been clear just how good Khazri’s night vision was - he’d discovered, not long into their friendship that the unsettling shine of his eyes was a tapetum lucidium, but what was the mechanism for seeing in total darkness?

“No,” said Khazri. There was a long, long pause, long enough that Imrael stopped considering the mechanics of vision and wondered if Khazri had run off into the dark. “This...a holy place.”

“Khazri, I know you have an image to maintain, but I’m struggling right now and would appreciate you not being as creepy as fucking possible.” That came out far louder than he meant it to, and he winced at the echos. “I won’t conjure a light, so could you please just get us out of here?”

He could have hired any guide - Khazri had pointed out as much when Imrael offered - but spending some time alone with the quiet, striking young man who’d leant him a hand when he’d needed it most had seemed an excellent idea at the time. Now that he was lost underground with a concussion and someone who seemed determined to offer as little help as possible, and was no closer to getting Khazri into bed than when they’d started, he was regretting that decision.

He stubbed his toe again.

No sex was worth this.

“I...don’t want to tell you your job,” he said, after they’d walked for another hundred years without speaking. “But are you sure we’re going the right way? It feels like we’re going...down.” They probably had been for a while and he’d been too focused on not walking into walls to notice.

Silence. And then, “Watch your step,” said Khazri.

Imrael stumbled and something shifted under his feet. He fell, hard. There was a hollow snap that seemed impossibly loud, and he bit back a scream.

His knee ached, and colours pulsed across his vision in time with every throb, but when he fumbled for it, cautiously extended his leg, he didn’t feel any damage. His foot brushed something on the floor, sending it rolling, and he groped after it. A long, light cylinder with a jagged, splintered end. “Is...is this what I think it is?”

“What do you think it was?” The voice asked.

He pitched the broken bone in the direction of the voice. “It’s a fucking corpse, Khazri. What the hell is wrong with you? This isn’t funny!” Khazri was hardly compassionate but Imrael had never known him to be deliberately cruel. Not like this. “I’m not going any further,” he said. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

There was a long pause and then Khazri’s voice came from the darkness; “In old places, things get left behind.”

“Yes, you _said_ that already, you-” Imrael cut himself off so quickly he almost choked on his tongue. Khazri _had_ said that before, in the ruins atop the hill. He’d said- _he’d said_ -

Kneeling in the darkness, bones shifting beneath his shins, Imrael ran back through everything they’d said to each other before the floor collapsed, and everything they’d said to each other since.

“It wasn’t ours to start with,” said Khazri’s voice, closer than it had been. “But we ended up with it. A holy place.”

Fumbling, Imrael’s hand closed around another bone and he held it up, between him and whatever was in the darkness, whispering to him with a stolen voice.

It began to laugh.

It didn’t sound like Khazri anymore. It didn’t even sound like a man.

It was like the noises the wolves made when Keira had tried to teach them how to talk, a yowling imitation without comprehension.

 _It never heard him laugh_ , Imrael realised.

Making light was as easy as breathing but breathing was _effort_ when you thought too hard about it and Imrael couldn’t stop thinking, couldn’t stop wondering where the thing was and what it was and how many dead cats this thing had seen, and if he really wanted to see it at all.

Sparks flickered and died in his palm, dim but much too bright after the long dark, and he had to screw his eyes closed against them.

Imrael pressed himself back against the stone floor, cold water soaking his coat, the bones of other fools digging into his back. This would work, it had to - the thing had begged him not to kindle light - but the magic wouldn’t catch and the laughter was all around him.

“Please,” he whispered, “Please, please, _please_ ,” not sure who he was begging but quite sure it would not help.

“Imrael,” said Khazri’s voice over the laughter. “ _Imrael._ ”

The spell still would not catch but the flickering, failing flame of it found _something_ in the dark, two eyes gleaming red, throwing back the light like those of some great beast.

“Imrael,” said Khazri, again.

The light caught.

Against the white phosphor glare of the magic, he could make out little of the room around him, only an impression of stone and rot and shadows, writhing around him more than the light’s flickering allowed for. The glow of it turned Khazri’s face into something grotesque, sharpening his features, hollowing out his eye sockets, and sending his shadow clawing up the wall behind him. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and they looked far sharper in the wan glow than they ever did under the sky. He looked fey and terrible, and Imrael didn’t think he’d ever been so glad to see anyone in his life.

Khazri reached out his hand and Imrael dropped the tibia and let him draw him to his feet.

They ran.

Even with the light, the tunnels were a maze of twists and turns, deadfalls and dead ends and Imrael could only trust that Khazri knew the way. There could be no doubt that this one, warm and alive, smelling of pine resin, woodsmoke and the animal musk of wolves, was real. Imrael could hear his ragged breathing in his ear, and held him close.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, when he could find the breath. “I probably should have listened to you.”

“I think you listened too well,” Khazri said, sounding, despite everything, amused. He squeezed Imrael’s hand. “Come on. We won’t be safe until we’re back above ground.”

The journey back did not seem half so long. Khazri moved fast, dragging Imrael more often than not, with little care for his injured leg and even less for the bruises Imrael’s tight grip on his hand would leave.

Finding the exit was almost an anticlimax - a dirty grey glow, almost imperceptible against the brightness of the conjured torch, and then suddenly they were scrambling over weeds and rubble and out into the day.

The wolves met them as they dragged themselves free, tongues lolling, tails held high. One caught Imrael’s coattail in its teeth, and the other butted him in the legs nearly hard enough to knock him over until Khazri wrestled them away.

“Sorry,” he said. “I think they were worried about you.”

“I’m sure they were.” Imrael contemplated his drool covered coat and hid a smile. “What _was_ that? I couldn’t see anything but shadows. Before the light went on, did you see-”

“I don’t- I didn’t- A memory or an echo, I don’t know.” Khazri’s ears were flat against his head. “Can you keep walking?”

Easier to let him change the subject and Imrael wasn’t sure he wanted an answer anyway. He liked being able to sleep at night. “Try and stop me. I want us one hundred miles from here by sundown.”

“Your head?” Khazri lifted his hand and then lowered it again without touching.

Imrael prodded at the wound himself - the blood had dried to a crust that was going to be hell to get out of his hair.  “It’s not that bad. Head wounds do bleed a lot.”

“Are you sure?”

“When we’re safe in a well-lit room at an inn, I’ll mend the graze. Thank you for coming.” Imrael caught Khazri’s eyes - striking and unreadable - and held them until Khazri looked away.

“You’re paying me,” he mumbled.

“We’ll see about a bonus for you, eh?” Making the most of it while he still had an excuse, Imrael caught Khazri’s hand again and dragged him down the rise. Khazri didn’t ask, because he never asked, Imrael wanted to talk and had rambled his way through most of the story before they’d found their way back to the road again.

“You know,” he said, enjoying the feel of packed dirt and not stone beneath his feet, the rustle of small animals in the undergrowth and the violent green of the grass, enjoying that he could look Khazri in the face. Or, at least, the hood. “If you didn’t speak in monosyllables, that thing might have had a harder time of it.”

“If I spoke more, it would've had a larger vocabulary to work with.”

“Fair point, well taken. Next time, if you say ‘Imrael, I’m pretty sure there’s an evil ghost monster living here, let’s not investigate,’ I promise I’ll listen.”

“Listen, maybe.” Khazri tilted his head enough that Imrael could see he was smirking beneath the cowl. “But will it _stop_ you?”

“Maybe! ...Probably not, but I might have been better prepared.” They walked in silence for a few paces. Grabbing Khazri’s hand again seemed a bit much, but Jeff was there, pressed so close it was a struggle not to trip over him with every step, and Imrael gratefully caught a hold of his ruff. “Wait, you said this was familiar.”

“Did I?”

“You said you had a warehouse. What the _hell_ were you storing there?”

“It was my family’s warehouse. And it’s a long story.”

The sun had just tipped past noon and already the tree shadows were lengthening. Imrael did not want to think about that. “What did we just resolve? You’re going to tell me things and I’m going to listen.”

Khazri ran his fingers through his hair, chewed his lip, sighed. And then began the tale.

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to everyone on [tumblr](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com) who voted I finish this and _not_ Imrael And Khazri Stop Pining And Do One Of Those Bafflingly Specific Sex Acts. I don't understand you guys at all.


End file.
